Bitter
Inventory yourself.
Who are you? How do you measure up?
How close are you to what we think you should be?
Then, like sun-ripened raspberries, pluck the abnormalities.
Put them in a jar labeled, INSECURITIES.
You can’t discard them, of course.
Your quirks are part of what make you unique.
They make you you—preserve them.
But we don’t want to see, so bottle it up and put it in a cupboard…
or better yet, a cellar.
Keep the jar in case someday the world wants raspberries;
or if not the world, someone.
Perhaps in vulnerability, that someone will open their cupboard
and you’ll find a loaf of dry bread hidden there.
In a box labeled INSECURITIES.
Thus, it stays concealed.
In vulnerability, you’ll reach deep into your cellar.
You’ll accept the bread, and they’ll accept the raspberries.
That’s the hope, isn’t it?
That your insecurities will compliment?
That you two can be open with one another
and find happiness in spite of us?
But that’s not how it works.
As you work to appear as you ought,
or as we think you ought,
or rather, as you think, we think, you ought,
you’ll find your raspberries are not preserves.
Call it a short self-life.
In the darkness…in the jars
your vulnerable parts suffocate.
They spoil. They rot. They die.
But “they” are what make you you, remember?
So you change into something not you.
You hide your unique attributes, to be normal.
To be like us.
But you fail to realize
that we are like your spoiled raspberries...
bitter.
05/09/15
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